How does one explain campaigning throughout 2007 on a platform of transcending racial divisions, while in that same year contributing $26,000 to a church whose pastor incites race hatred?

Dr Krauthammer gets to the heart of the matter (emphasis added):

What is Obama to do? Dismiss all such questions about his associations and attitudes as “distractions.” And then count on his acolytes in the media to wage jihad against those who have the temerity to raise these questions. As if the character and beliefs of a man who would be president are less important than the “issues.” As if some political indecency was committed when Obama was prevented from going through his latest — 21st and likely last — primary debate without being asked about Wright or Ayers or the tribal habits of gun-toting, God-loving Pennsylvanians.

Many of us who voted for Bill Clinton the first time learned the hard way that the character of a man who would be president is a crucial matter.

I would even venture to say that is possibly the main reason why so many Democrats are in Obama’s camp, instead of Hillary’s: they learned from the Clintons that the Clintons are not to be trusted.

Character and personal beliefs permeate every action and decision a person makes. They are not “distractions”. To the contrary, they are signposts directing you to what road they will take.

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Don’t miss today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern. The morning’s going to be busy, but there will be more posting later.

The Obama affiliation with Weather Underground unrepentant ex-terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers was the big story yesterday at a lot of blogs. I intentionally waited to post on it today because we should be paying attention for more than one news cycle.

It turns out that we don’t have to go back as far as 2001 to find that Obama’s friends are as unrepentant as ever. Just last year, Ayers and Dohrn attended a reunion–no kidding–of what must have been the tiny remnant of SDS members who still haven’t figured out that they were wrong about everything. Listen to what Bill Ayers, who hosted Barack Obama’s first fundraiser, has to say about the United States.

Go to Powerline to listen. Part II has more. Keep in mind that those clips are from a reunion in November 2007.

Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.…Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that.

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.…Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.

This is a particularly harmful waste of school hours for underprivileged children who need a strong and rigorous school curriculum since school is most likely the only place where they would learn literacy skills, without which they can not progress: Betsy asks,

Think of the problems that we have today in teaching literacy and basic math skills. Would any of those problems be ameliorated by teaching “social justice and liberation?”

The issue, though, isn’t what Ayers thought then; it’s what he thinks now.

Read Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, which was published — in actual horrific irony — on Sept. 10, 2001. Though I have to admit it’s pretty well written, it’s filled with more paternalism (“A squad of cops in Cleveland had dragged Black men from a motel and shot them down in cold blood, and now we would, I thought, even the score.”) and romanticism of what were ultimately terrorist acts. Ayers was also quoted in 2001 saying that he has no regrets for his past actions, but rather he feels that “we didn’t do enough.” Take a gander at his Web site and see if you find contrition or self-aggrandizement.

What someone did 40 years ago — within reason — should not damn that person forever. But that’s assuming offending individuals pay their debt to society and repent. Ayers has done neither.

I genuinely hope Obama’s got as much distance as humanly possible between himself and Ayers, and that Ayers is just, as Obama said in the debate, “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”

Some neighborhood: There are Auchi, Rezko, and terrorist fundraisers, too.

“I don’t want to just end the war, I want to end the mindset that got us into war. I want to initiate diplomacy. [President Richard] Nixon understood” the importance of diplomacy, Mr. Obama said, as did Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, he asserted.

Kennedy blew it on the Bay of Pigs and Nixon signed over a defeat, but Reagan was successful by winning the arms race over the Soviet Union.

* Will Obama disclose his full relationship with Ayers and Dohrn?* Will Obama disavow his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn as well as return any money that they have donated to him in the past?* Were Obama’s representatives speaking directly or indirectly with the communist terrorists known as FARC?* Will Obama completely denounce Marxist-Leninist ideology, which was espoused by his father as well as friends like Ayers and Dohrn and groups such as FARC?

In a Feb. 28 letter, FARC chieftain Raul Reyes cheerily reported to his inner circle that he met “two gringos” who assured him “the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support ‘Plan Colombia’ nor will he sign the TLC (Free Trade Agreement).”

Aside from some interesting possibilities about who these “gringos” are — a congressional delegation did visit Ecuador and an international leftist “congress” was held in Quito around this time — the real question is why anyone secretly consorting with FARC would be able to speak for presidential candidate Obama.

Obama hasn’t said a whole lot about Colombia other than to criticize President Bush’s good relations with President Uribe. With this correspondence suggesting that FARC knows what he thinks, maybe the American voters have a right to know what he thinks, too. Five questions come to mind:

1. Is it true Obama would cut off Plan Colombia military aid to our ally, which would serve the terrorist group FARC’s interests?

2. Does Obama still oppose a free trade agreement for Colombia, even though that puts him on the same side as FARC in the debate?

3. Does Obama know or care that one of his staffers or supporters is claiming to disclose his positions in secret meetings with FARC terrorists outside government channels?

4. Can he tell us why his supporters would pass on such information to terrorists, and what he or she could gain from it?

5. Will Obama, as president, treat FARC as the serious terrorists they are, given that they still hold three Americans hostage?

These aren’t idle “gotcha” questions, by the way. Based on his campaign so far, Obama favors meeting and negotiating with rogue leaders without preconditions, passing secret messages to foreign countries at odds with his public positions and tolerating Che-flag wielding leftists among his supporters who advance a radical agenda in his name.

American Thinker correctly warns we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but we’re still waiting for the media to aks Obama a few tough questions. These would be a good start.

Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahar and Saeed Seyam entered Egypt via the Rafah border crossing along with four other Hamas officials and headed by road to Cairo, witnesses said. They were escorted at the border by Egyptian security men.…Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip by force in June from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, has rejected Western demands to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deals

The bill, the Coordinated American Response to Extreme Radicals Act (CARTER Act), would prohibit any taxpayer dollars from being directed to the Carter Center. The Center has received at least $19 million in federal taxpayer funds since 2001.

The Hamas Charter asserts that “initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to [Hamas’] principles….There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” And by Jihad, Hamas does not mean an internal struggle for personal improvement.

Not only do Hamas members oppose a “two-state solution,” they believe that nation-states are un-Islamic. Instead, an Islamic caliphate is to be re-established, an empire that is to expand until the Dar al-Islam, the world ruled by righteous Muslims, consumes the Dar al-Harb, the world in which infidels and apostates currently hold sway. “Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad,” Hamas member and Palestinian parliamentarian Yunis al-Asal pledged this month on a Hamas television program.

Does Carter sincerely think he can convince Meshaal to reject such ideas and embrace the Carter Center’s kumbaya mission of “waging peace and building hope”? Does he really believe he can change Mashaal’s mind, much less open his heart?

On Sunday, Aaron Klein and John Batchelor interviewed Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister of Hamas, on WABC radio. The interview produced a scoop which, for some reason, has not been widely publicized: Hamas has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Yousef said, “We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election.”

Expect a rerun of the disastrous Carter presidency if Obama gets the job.

Two things: First, if Obama wants to put American workers first, why is he opposing a trade deal whose sole purpose is to open up Colombia’s markets to American-made products? Over 90 percent of Colombian goods can already enter the U.S. duty-free. Second, violence against unionists in Colombia has fallen dramatically, from 275 killed in 1996 to 39 last year.…Obama opposes the Colombia FTA because trade is a four-letter word among those “bitter” working-class Democrats to whom he sorely needs to build inroads. It’s that simple.

Finally, here is how Latin Americans view the situation: Hugo Chavez beat the United States, and Colombia is now all alone. She got in bed with Tio Sam and has nothing but shame to show for it. We just gave every country down there an object lesson in why it is foolish to trust in our friendship. This is how we gain friends in Latin America?